Are You a Good Negotiator?

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Paul DS and Sarah seagull talk about their experiences negotiating what they've learned and where they've struggled one key factor of course is defining what constitutes a successful negotiation as Paul points out one definition is squeezing every last penny out of the other side that is not Paul's definition especially when negotiating a salary with a new employee Sarah meanwhile discusses the tactics she uses to try to guide potential clients to the price and options she hopes they will accept plus Sarah explains how she picked her new office space and Paul explains why his experience with a vistage peer group has been life-changing even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats morning report which Inc magazine recently named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to for free at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast or regulars Paul DS who is CEO of Paul DS cabinet makers which is based outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables and Sarah seagull who is founder and CEO of seagull Communications a public relations firm based in San Francisco the episode is titled are you a good negotiator welcome Paul and Sarah it's great to have you here you know over the last couple years doing this podcast the issue of negotiating has come up kind of indirectly a bunch of times and I'm curious what your experiences uh with it have been I I guess I would start you know how important a skill do you think it is and and do you think you're good at it maybe Paul start with you well it's an important skill I can think of a couple of situations that happen over and over again in the life of a business owner the first one being of course hiring people figuring out what you're going to pay them or responding when someone ask for a raise and that's a particular kind of negotiation then there's also dealing with landlords in our business our product doesn't really have a set price so we more or less end up negotiating a price with every single customer and then there's purchasing yeah it's really important I wouldn't say I'm particularly good at it but I think that it would be useful to have a definition of what good means and the classic definition means you squeezed every penny out of the other party that you possibly could or got them to submit somehow I don't know if that is that the classic definition or or it's certainly one definition let's say that okay it's not the classic it's the Asic definition fair enough it's for people who are asses and uh I don't tend to look at at negotiations that way I tend to consider whatever the off offer is compared to what my next best alternative is and that's how I think about it I do tend to play by the rule that the first person to actually put out a number is in the weaker position so I'll avoid doing that if I can what happens when the other person is playing by that rule as well you have some hemming and hawing and long silences and it really depends on on how comfortable they are with being pushed into that position and more often than not when it happens to me it's usually in the in the context of hiring someone and just asking a question like okay how much you getting paid now now Woodworkers aren't known in general for their negotiating prowess so usually people just tell me and if I say how about this they may come back with asking for a little more but a lot of times there's just acceptance of what I'm proposing because I'm not trying to screw anybody but sure at the beginning of of a relationship with someone that's going to go on for a long time you're anticipating that you'll have to give out raises or bonuses or whatever so you do want to try to keep the initial pay reasonable how about you Sarah how important do you think it is as a skill to what you do and and how good at it do you think you are I grew up in Boston and part of my childhood growing up was going to the rimfield Antique fair so I learned the art of bartering and negotiation very early and my mother and her best friend Libby would always tell me like if you want something you can't a let them know that you really want it it's like playing poker you got to keep your poker face and you have to be willing to walk away from it and so take those into account um any negotiation to go into where I have to be able to walk away I was reading the news this week about New York employment and how employers are now required to put ranges um pay ranges on every job opportunity that they put out that's something that I've already set like when I hire people um I hire for the position and I have a range for that position and I don't deviate outside of that so I have to be willing to lose a candidate and uh I have lost candidates because of that but I also he need to like stick with what's best for my business so I don't consider myself a hard negotiator but like I spend a lot of time knowing what is it is worth for me to invest does that answer your question um it does it sounds like you're pretty confident in your negotiating ability it's just that I have to be able to walk away you know and and know okay maybe it didn't this isn't going to happen because it wasn't meant to be and be okay with that because if I go in feeling like I got the short end of the stick it's not going to give me a good feeling about the relationship at the get-go so the walking away is the most important part well do you have a kickass antique collection well I unfortunately married a person that doesn't love antiques so it's a it's a modern with a light flare of antiques I'm I'm just curious about the idea that you you would at some young age form some notion of what a negotiation is and that colors everything you do and I think that being able to or always Define the negotiation as being able to walk away is I've been in situations where I couldn't walk away when I lost a lease at very short notice and I needed to move somewhere you know like you can't necessarily walk away so what do you do when you can't walk away that's a tough question to answer I don't know that I've been in that position recently so I don't have anything to kind of reference so I don't know did it come up at all Sarah during the Great resignation uh where maybe you wanted to stick with your salary ranges for positions but the market was moving higher and you wound up having to adjust and and not walking away you know what it is it actually happens sometimes with clients like we have some long-term clients that are VC backed and as you know VC funding has dried up significantly and so those clients have said hey we need to reduce our retainer and it's below our Baseline retainer but these folks have been working with us for five years and we have a deep relationship with them and so we're willing to do that because we know that there is a future of better retainers on the horizon so yeah there there are those situations when discussing salaries and Sarah you were an employee uh journalist like me for a long time the the the topic often comes up that one of the reasons women don't get paid as much as men on average is that they don't negotiate as hard as men do do you think that's a factor and was that something that you were conscious of throughout your career as an employee and and perhaps even now that's a really good question Lauren that's like a deep question when I was working my way up in the the broadcast journalism industry and becoming a te TV reporter again I just wanted the job you you weren't willing to walk away no I wasn't that's the mistake we all make but I was young like I I wanted the job I wanted to be in that next market so like they could literally have handed me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I would have been like that's fine my first job in Broadcast News was 1996 it was when Fox News channel was just getting going and I convinced my way into an internship there and it was in New York City for 24-Hour news station that was competing against CNN and they paid me $50 a week well you guys were both in Industries where the the help is treated as disposable because there's always people clawing their way up and ready to replace you that's true and I've had a very very different approach to negotiating salaries particularly lately which is the workers I need are very hard to find and have options so usually after I ask someone what they're making and what they want to make and presuming this is someone I want to hire I'll actually offer them more than that usually a buck an hour more than they ask for just to say listen I want to hire you I want you to work for me and I'm going to give you more than you asked and if you don't work out I'm going to fire you but if you do we're going to have a great relationship and and I think that people hate negotiating who aren't forced to do it and that having the opportunity right at the beginning of a relationship between boss and employee to demonstrate that you value them even more than they value themselves I think it really helps to set people off on the right foot when you get them into the company now you got to want these people in your company and you've got to feel like you can't get other ones at at the drop of a hat so different Industries are going to be different but this is the approach I've used and I think it really helps with employee satisfaction and retention like we don't have any quiet quitting going on in my place and we didn't have any great resignation either I did have a couple of people who asked for more money when gas prices went up but other than that no discontent at all obviously i' I've increased the understanding of my value um since working in the news industry and going from you know Fox to NBC to CBS and all of those stations um and Beyond I learned my value I learned my value as a business owner but I also the the way that I have this is something my old partner taught me is to be super transparent with my staff about our budgets and our p&l and giving them an understanding of like this is how the money where the money goes uh and this is what I can afford and so they have an understanding of what I'm able to do and that like you know I don't have this huge bucket of money that I'm not just not distributed to them so my salaries are super Fair um and I do a lot of my homework I do do a lot of homework to make sure that I'm competitive within the industry I have a lot of young people on my team their expenses are pretty low because they're not married they don't have kids but the benefits that we provide are really good and more importantly at least when I was that age and that that in that face what was more important to me was the opportunity and the the title growth so even if I can't give somebody a big raise because it's not within my budget if I look at them and say hey I would like to you know change your title and then uh once my p&l lets me I want to give you a raise how does that sound usually that's a great thing for them in general because I've been so clear about what I'm able to do let me ask you this as Paul said at the beginning it it's not just salaries there there are lots of things that you have to negotiate as an owner including you know your your office space and deals with uh vendors and and even pricing as in Paul's case and I think perhaps in yours too Sarah that can be a negotiation with many or most uh of your clients yeah I'm curious you most entrepreneurs tend to learn things the hard way are there negotiations that you look back on and think boy I had a learn a lesson there I could have done so much better I I remember I'm still annoyed that I spent too much on a car 20 years ago I I'm curious if if you've learned lessons that way either of you oh I had an experience that probably will not be replicated anytime soon but this was 2009 got an email that in retrospect looked extremely sketchy and it turned out to be from the Afghan Afghan an mission to the United Nations and they wanted a table so I went up there met with the guys and then they came down to see me and then we negotiated the price and you have not negotiated unless you've negotiated against Afghans because those guys there were three of them in my office and I desperately needed work and they just kept beating me down nickel by nickel until I finally said I'm sorry you guys got to leave I can't I can't do anymore this is not even worth doing and then they were all smiles and they're like yeah now you just learned how to negotiate like an Afghan and uh we made the deal at their price because I desperately needed the work but that was the one where just someone on the other side being relentless and willing to to go for half an hour to get an extra penny that was a hard lesson and uh the lesson really is don't do business with people who are if that's their only concern like I try not to get in those situations ations now and we present what we do as valuable and I try to always be ready to walk away at the very end if someone presents themselves that way they have other characteristics that are going to make them difficult as clients that's that's been my experience was that the case in that instance it kind of was the the flip side to those guys was that the whole experience was pretty interesting so it kept me engaged and just going into their offices and dealing with a team of people there was still a a very big divide between the uh Afghans who'd been employees of the mission prior to the Taliban takeover and subsequent and so when I was dealing with these guys one of them would leave the room and the other ones would be like he's Taliban or if the old guy left the room then the the other two be like he's an Infidel you know was you just don't it's not a normal situation so that was interesting but um and at the end of the day we we we did a we satisfied them and it was worth doing but uh it was hard it was very big difference in mindset than I'm used to interesting my biggest headache comes every year so we use like news monitoring services and other software some software they have their rate and that is it and some it's a negotiation where it's very used car dealership like where they're like well let me go back to my manager and see what I can do and I have learned over the years to stick to my guns and you know say well you know what maybe there's an onboarding fee but I think that you need to wave that onboarding fee for me and 99% of the time they will because they want to sign you up because the onboarding fee is not the ongoing revenue for them so they're more interested in maintaining your subscription and having you pay every month so I'm like I'm not going to give you a down payment we're actually doing that right now for our you know Healthcare and benefits and it's a great company we love them and we think what they do is like fantastic they want a $22,000 setup fee wait even though you've used them in the past they want a setup fee no well see we're setting up a new system and so we have to sign a new contract and we're adding a new healthc care El element to it so there's a $2,000 setup fee for that Healthcare element and they told me that yesterday on a call and after that call thought to myself I have no intention on paying that setup fee like I am going to say okay well we we'll sign on the dotted line but you have to get rid of that setup fee well also their marginal cost of servicing another customer is zero I mean you're in a particular situation with software we run into situations where we have clients who just don't want to pay any deposit and sometimes those are substantial jobs and then my sales guys come to me and say hey we uh we can get this job if we take it if we do it on a net 30 basis and can we do that and I usually say yes as long as it's someone who's reputable but you have to have some Financial strength in order to offer those terms but we frequently get jobs in the face of competition at not the lowest price because we're willing to do that so I think that knowing what you can afford to do or in the case Sarah in your case like were you willing to walk away from that software I'm not actually because I love the software but that's part of the thing is that yeah no but like I have to pretend I am like it also you have to let them know that you're looking at competitors because that's also they're going to be like oh well she might use this other competitor and I could say and if you have time to do that and see what those rates are and then go back come back armed with the the offer that your competitors are going to give you hopefully it's less than the one that you want to actually work with and say Hey listen I'll work with you if you can beat or match this this offer but you have to have that homework done before that negotiation so you know what your other options are like diamond rings right you go you're getting engaged you got to go to go to three separate stores look at the same Diamond size and shape and grade that you want and then if you really like the particular jewelry store go back to them and say Hey listen I saw this this same Diamond same shape same whatever at your competitor can you match it they're gonna say yes well sure but I think the most frustrating thing is when people present you information and say okay this is the start of a negotiation when it actually isn't and the best example is every year the health insurance renewals so Lauren you you and uh Jean Marx were talking about your ability to negotiate with the health insurers which in my experience has been absolutely zero and they give you options that aren't really options that it's all designed so that you can't actually compare it easily with any other company's offerings and the whole thing is designed to just make you surrender as a business owner and it works because nobody really wants to dig in and try to figure out what's going on because they've really made a huge effort to make it difficult to get real analysis going so that is something that grinds my gears on a continual basis when when some huge organization is all friendly like oh you're you're shopping you're not shopping you're either surrendering or not surrendering but if you don't surrender then you don't have what you need that drives me crazy Sarah you actually sold your business and I'm curious if you learned anything about negotiating in that process but let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsor I'm here with Rob Levan co-founder 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for my business and yeah I've made some mistakes along the way but negotiating that sale yeah I felt really uncomfortable with it just to to be totally transparent because I had never done that like you you talked to I was talking to a a Serial entrepreneur the other day who literally is sold like four or five companies and that's just new territory for me so any advice on that I'm happy to hear because that's I don't know where to do go for homework for that like what what a PR agency should be asking for when they're required there's no forums for that there's no support groups for that in my vistage group there have been a number of companies that got sold and that's been very interesting to be able to Peak over the shoulder of those owners as they go through negotiations some are negotiating with private Equity groups some are negotiating with Angel Investors and there it's really different depending on who you're negotiating with I mean that's the main takeaway if it's someone like private Equity it does it all day every day it can be a pretty rough ride and and in our group this thing which happens over and over again with private equity which is a deal is kind of carved out and everybody gets all excited about it and lawyers right to stuff and you get to the night before the closing and the buyer just comes back and says oh everything we said you know we're just going to give you 20% less just to see what would happen and clearly that's a a practiced technique by buyers to to get people really bought into the deal and to the point where if they've been talking about it with their family and talking about it with their bankers and friends and they find it very hard to walk away and very humiliating to admit that they're in a position where they've got to take a shot like that so that if you're dealing with professionals watch out would be my my takeaway but also the value of a business group that I haven't sold my business but I'm much more educated in what it could look like from having been around people who were doing it this is that kind of a side note to that is I'm really fascinated by the I don't know what how to describe it but like the human nature of of negotiating and price um setting I listen to a lot of uh different podcasts sorry Lauren geez I know I'm sorry and I don't know where I can reference this from but someone was saying that when you put together a proposal for somebody when you get to the the pricing slide people tend to go with the first option they see and the last option they hear so if you have three pricing sections here one tier two and tier three and you really want them to do two tier because you think it's the best you want to put that tier two as the first option on your slide the second option should be the next best version and the third option should be like the the Baseline version but you should speak to it where you end with the first the the one that you want first because that's what they're going to go with but visually they're seeing that one first in line does that make sense am I being clear I think I know what you're saying and uh that makes a certain amount of sense because just the number one is more appealing than the number three you know it's stupid but it's true I had never heard that that the thing about the talking and the and the reading but presumably there was some testing done to in order to come up with this Theory although in business that's not always true so it makes a certain amount of sense does it work for you yeah um I've also you know I'm always trying to improve my skills in that but on this podcast it was recommended that we go back to doing iners proposals and we have two clients one is in contract and the other one is hopefully they're going to be signing a contract for January 1 we did both of those in person I think that I like trying to use that those they're not tricks but there's just things that humans tend to choose like if you talk about retail like if you talk to anybody who does like Rick and mortar store management people naturally when they walk into a store go right 75% of the time people will walk into a store and take a right so you want to make sure that whatever you're promoting and whatever you really want people to buy is to the the right and there's a whole psych like theories about the way people move through a space so why not do that with your proposals and how you negotiate with somebody it's like okay what are people more likely like if you if you put your slide red versus blue is that going to make a difference like McDonald's for example they they figured out that the colors red and yellow bake people salivate and that's why they use those colors so I I think all of those things should be thought about as you're putting together your your negotiation I will start with the hey you can do the the Baseline version and you know this is a great place to start or you can move on and you can do this kind of extra version that's going to incorporate all these things that you that you want to to do plus some but it may not be within your budget but here's the one I really think you should do and then seeing is the first one on the all the way to the left of the slide and but I'm talking about it at last and I'm saying hey this is the one I really recommend um and that's kind of how I always go through it is that always the most expensive option no it's not and do you have you ever tried labeling the first one you present as option three usually we label them based on the client so like for example if we're if we're pitching a a beer client option one will be pale ale the option two will be micro brew and the third option will be you know some other type of beer and that's how we usually do it I don't do one two and three because I think that that tear them we do the exact opposite which is we very explicitly tear people but try to have that discussion before we present the final our final idea so we have three we have what we call Standard premium and Ultra because basically a table the function is the same it's almost like cars it's like a Yugo will get you there it might break down but you can drive it from here to there and so we have standard which is simple and premium which is sort of the Toyota best value and then Ultra could be anything and we try to get people to tell us where they want to be before we start getting too specific about what we're going to propose for them so it's just a different way to think about presenting all this stuff well usually I also tell people that you know we not every not all these three options are going to be what they want and we're happy to go back and create kind of a menu item for them but like I know what it takes my team to put together a social media strategy and post you know three to five times a week for a client and all that and so I I do have a a baseline for that and it's given me it makes it much easier for for me to figure out that pricing do you ever deviate from it if if there's a client that you would like to work with and they say we like your Baseline proposal but we want to pay you half what you're requesting what do you do well we have a client right now who runs a a wildlife organization and we run their social media for them and it's fantastic like you know it's cute bears and lions and big cats and all that kind of good stuff so it's it's fun content for my team to to post right now they're only on Facebook and you know there there are family-owned business they need to be careful about their bottom line we understand that they know that in order to gain visibility for what they do they need to dip into Instagram and Facebook but they're not sure they want to do it they want to kind of test the waters but they don't really want to throw a bite at it until they're ready and so we really like them we think they're lovely people and so I was like all right what we'll do is for a month we will just charge you the administration fee of adding you to our social media um platform and we'll just redistribute the the Facebook content on those channels so then you can make a decision at the end so yes I do deviate but usually it's for like a limited period of time with hey we'll try it out but at the end of it if it works and we're all happy you're going to have to pay the check there's one other thing that we do in price negotiations that may or may not be relevant to anybody else but we find that whatever the cost of the table is is pretty much sort of a number that nobody has any notion of so let's say it's a $25,000 table they're like okay $25,000 table what happens though if you present them the freight charge as the actual freight charge they go bananas so we will often take money out of the freight and and install and just put it into the table price and we're not pressing their hot button of oh my God it costs this to get something across the country and when you think about it why wouldn't it cost a lot of money to get something across the country in three days but that's just a a way to present a number that doesn't uh chase people away that that they pay the same out in the end no matter what they're just looking at it a different way and I don't know whether that actually falls under the guise of negotiation or not but it's it's something that we end up doing Paul I'm goingon to need a new table soon because um we're oh no I'm serious we're about to sign a lease for um an office all right uh happy to help you with that maybe that could be one of the shows where we do some video we could have a real live negotiation yeah that might be fun the table will be $8 and the Freight is so you could actually Jay probably has a perspective on that too taking costs that people are going to need to pay but don't want to pay and putting them into something that they they're just not so sensitive to well in a in a way it's being it's being entirely fair to them you're giving them a better sense of the overall cost right from the get-go by doing that right yes and we have to retain the ability to to price Freight separately because it varies so enormously depending on where you are relative to where we are and then there's certain nonintuitive things like Freight to North Dakota is is triple what it cost to go to uh Chicago not because it's so much farther but because they can't get people to unload the trucks or it's out of the way of the main truck routes or something going to Florida and going to Long Island are kind of the same thing so yeah they're going to end up paying it but uh we if we show them what it really is they they often just head for the hills or they're very upset Sarah I was going to ask you about your search for office space anyway tell did did you negotiate a good deal yeah so we um we're looking at two different options we're do we get a an office along with our parent company or do we get our own just little office because most of our parent company people are not in the Bay Area so it's not really important for them and so we looked at different options and honestly the even though there's a mass amount of commercial real estate out there and available in San Francisco some of the bigger places are holding on to their prices but the inventory is so big right now and I I didn't want to get an office that I was beholden to be there every day of the week right I wanted to find something that was going to be a place where we could you know hang our hats and feel free to come in two days a week three days a week and not have be burdened by a um a rent check and feeling like we weren't using it enough so I opted to get I put in an offer um for a space I low balled them like crazy and uh they came back with a little bit of an increase and I went back and went with a little less of an increase and were literally $250 above what I originally wanted which is perfect um and it's a little space but it's a cool building that we are possibly going to be able to put a cool mural on the side of the building I'm actually been chatting with a a mural company um on the East Coast um which we might invite to to do it for us what what kind of mural would it be branding for your business no I don't know if you've ever seen the pink pink wall on the side of H Paul Smith store on Melrose Street in in Los Angeles but it's this it's a pink wall it's literally all it is is pink and you any day of the week you you drive down that street and you will see a line of influencers standing there to pose in front of a pink wall and it's like it's a landmark right and so we want to do something that is a landmark and makes that it's a beautiful Corner property so you have a wall that extends on both sides it's a great brick building it's on a main hight traffic Street on the Edge of Chinatown and the financial district so it's near everything and we just want to we want to eventually be oh your offices are in that building like you're in the pink wall building that kind of thing we want to do something that's fun and happy and usable by influencers is that something you're thinking about too yeah I mean it's not and it's not anything that's going to bring us Revenue but it's something that's going to make our space a curiosity and fun and um I'd like to be associated with promoting art and culture and um using um available space in the Bay Area so that's why we liked the space was that it wasn't one of these just traditional like Office Buildings it's a little bit more on the funky side and I I see a lot of ways we can make that funkiness really fun and and happy I wanted a happy place how long is your lease for two years is there a possibility that you'd be able to grow there I did in the contract ask they have a they have an office upstairs from us and I asked for first R of refusal um on that space that those people move out well good luck I get think a lot of reasons to not do it but if you're excited about it uh go for it there's a lot of reasons not to do it I'm sure if like it's limited in terms of the size but I don't know I think it's still going to take a while for people to be in an office every day of the week I was talking to this agency that we're working with um uh on a project and they are based in Chicago and their offices are in an old retail space and I was like oh that's really cool and they're like yeah and our second office is across the street so that's how they grew so they didn't leave their office and find a whole new space Sarah on a previous episode with Karen Clark Cole you guys had a conversation where Karen said she had space that she might be interested in uh subleasing to you did you ever check that out I did and it's a really it's a beautiful space I mean it's wonderful but the my reservations with doing that was that I would still be in somebody else's space you know like and we have we have inventory from our clients like I'm sitting here looking at you know 15 boxes of shoes from our Australian shoe client WAMU I'm looking at a freezer filled with sample products from our UK client poo which is a dessert company like I need somewhere I can put all that stuff because we send out samples that's a lot to ask somebody to be like hey can we put all of our inventory in your offices so I just wanted somewhere I could put all that and and not have to worry about it and so that's kind of where we ended up uh doing our own thing got it Paul you mentioned uh vistage I wanted to follow up with you as you know we recently did a show Sarah was part of it where we talked about uh the value of uh business groups uh peer groups there was some discussion uh about what makes a good group you've had I know you've referred to it numerous times on the show including just now a really great experience with your vistage group did you just luck into it how did you find the right group and how did you know it was the right group uh I think luck is involved absolutely because my big takeaway is that in vistage anyway the groups are assembled and run by a chairperson and the capabilities and personality and recruiting ability of that chair person is critical is going to make or break the group now I haven't been in six business groups like Jay but it sounds like his experience had a lot more neutral or bad hours than I've had in vistage and I was lucky that my chair was just someone who has extremely wide experience in life and business has worked for big businesses small businesses had an accounting background it's been in manufacturing been in finance uh combat veteran you know like you name it he's been around the block so that's good because you spent a lot of time with the chair in vistage and that person's point of view should be one that supports the members where they are he put together a group that included several other manufacturers but then also people who are in businesses that were very different and I've derived enormous benefit from just seeing how different Industries work what challenges are unique to this industry or that industry and what challenges do every industry face and what challenges do all companies face say if they're at 10 employees as opposed to 30 employees as opposed to 100 employees the perspective it gave me was just it literally changed my life for the better I was invited to come to a to a introductory meeting and this was was shortly after Jay wrote that column for you back in 201 I guess it was 2011 or 2012 about his business group experience and I had gotten invitations to various things over the years and just threw them away but after reading him talking about it I was like you know what I've been sitting in my office by myself for 20 some years I don't know anything I'm an idiot why don't I just go find out what other people think and start networking and it has been of enormous benefit to me some of the members of the group uh who were there at the first meeting I went to were still in the same group so I've been in add it 10 years now and there have been some members who came and went some of the members have grown their businesses enormously of seeing a couple of Acquisitions a lot of it had to do with where I started from like Jay I started my company when I was very young at a time when entrepreneurship was kind of like nobody talked about it there wasn't a way to talk about it and so I spent a lot of time just on my own with in in terms of thinking about how to be a boss how to own a company what to do I did not have many ideas coming at me about how to do that and that all changed after I joined bage and I I thought Jay didn't do a great job of presenting the potential upside well he acknowledged it could be lifechanging yeah but he kind of like yeah it can be life in a j style one of of the concerns he raised is that in the groups that he's been in he's felt that there are members who really don't contribute positively and he felt that you need a facilitator who's willing to to fire members essentially yeah has that ever been an issue for you I mean it's not like I complained to my chair and said hey you got to get rid of that guy uh it really hasn't come up and that's what I was talking about chair quality and I think that to a certain extent you're more likely to get what you pay for in these situations so when Jay tried to do it by himself or he was doing some of the lower cost organizations I would guess that the the the bad experience is clustered more there my chair is is very focused on delivering value and the other members of the group that I'm in are all very impressive like I'm the worst one there and uh my business has grown the slowest and go to the reasons for that but not sure what you mean by worst Paul uh I'm the poorest I'm the dumbest I have the smallest company and uh it's going to be hardest for me to make some $2 million deal to get out I've spoken to your chair and I know you're not the dumbest okay but but it's like when you're playing sports if you're trying to get better at sports you don't always want to play with people who are worse than you you want to play with people who are better than you and so that's what I get out of the group I think Jay would agree with you on that we're out of time but quickly Sarah have have you had any further thoughts about it are you still interested in a group um I I got an email from my Region's person um which I need to respond to and thank you for reminding about that this is vistage yeah vistage and I plan on just checking it out like I was told that I can probably go and sit on in a couple meetings and see whether or not it's a vibe that I connect with and and then make some more decisions um uh as I go but uh I don't think I'm going to jump into that until Jan January just because um my next my next couple weeks are crazy and nice well we we'll be here to hear what happens but we're out of time my thanks to Paul DS and Sarah seagull and to our sponsor work better now thanks for sharing guys as always wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's L ren21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think he can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by J Theron founder of blank word Productions okay okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]